Richard Florida Calls For New Urban Social Compact

Joel Kotkin, a paid shill for the right-wing ‘philanthropist’ Howard Ahmanson, recently suggested that Richard Florida had abandoned his ‘discredited’ creative class theory about the richness of cities. Not only did Florida respond, and dismantle the weak arguments that Kotkin arrayed, he went on to call for a new urban social compact, to extend the benefits of dynamic cities to all of their denizens.

Richard Florida, Did I Abandon My Creative Class Theory? Not So Fast, Joel Kotkin

We need to leverage density, skill, and knowledge to propel further innovation, economic growth and development (lord knows our economy needs it), and at the same time we have to build new institutions, new strategies, and a new urban social compact to improve the lot of those at the bottom.

That new social compact must address two important issues. One, it must work to lift the wages of those who toil in low-wage service and working-class jobs by harnessing more of their skills. My own research shows that when cognitive and social skills are added to those jobs it increases their wages, at a rate even greater than when they are added to knowledge work.  And second, this urban socialcompact must address the other side of the coin, making housing more affordable by increasing density, and making urban centers more accessible by improving transit. There is a lot that cities can and must do to improve the lot of the 66 percent who aren’t reaping the full gains of the creative age. This report from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (who I worked with) outlines some strategies for extending New York’s knowledge and tech boom to a much broader strata of workers and residents. It’s just a beginning.

Cities are back, as much as Joel Kotkin wants to deny it. They have turned the corner and are growing and flourishing again.  People with skill, knowledge, and creativity, entrepreneurial businesses, and small shops are returning to places that were once given up for lost.  Our suburbs are being transformed bit by bit into more walkable, denser mixed-use places. A new urban revolution is upon us, driven in large part by the returns to density, skills, and creativity.

As in all economic transformations, the invisible hand of the market can only take us so far. The rest is up to us. This is not a time to complain about or belittle this shift, or, as with Kotkin, to pretend that it is not even taking place. We need to build the new institutions and the new social compact that can harness its power and extend its benefits to everyone. And there’s reason for optimism here, even in the face of all the undeniable inequities and problems we have, because the logic of history is pointing in a positive direction.

Our future economic development no longer turns on pumping resources mindlessly out of the ground or tearing up the environment to build houses on the suburban periphery. Real economic growth and development turns on the development of the full talents and capabilities of all our workers in high-tech, knowledge and creative fields, and in factories, farms, and services. And the places that are best suited to that task are our dense, innovative cities—our greatest innovation of all.

The path toward more dense urban environments is accelerating, as more young people and boomers reject the suburbs and move toward a more urban lifestyle. If we are to avoid squeezing out the current residents of America’s cities, we need to extend the benefits that more dynamic and potent cities can offer to all, not just the creatives and bankers.

Source: thedailybeast.com

21 March 2013 15 Permalink

Building From The Inside Out

Paul Goldberger, Exclusive Preview: Google’s New Built-from-Scratch Googleplex

What is really striking about this project, however, isn’t what the architecture will look like, about which renderings can show only so much anyway. It’s the way in which Google decided what it wanted and how it conveyed this to its architects. Google is, as just about everyone in the world now knows, the most voracious accumulator of data on the planet. When it decided to build a building, it did what it did best, which was to gather data. Google studied, and tried to quantify, everything about how its employees work, about what kind of spaces they wanted, about how much it mattered for certain groups to be near certain other groups, and so forth.

The layout of bent rectangles, then, emerged out of the company’s insistence on a floor plan that would maximize what Radcliffe called “casual collisions of the work force.” No employee in the 1.1-million-square-foot complex will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk from any other, according to Radcliffe. “You can’t schedule innovation,” he said. “We want to create opportunities for people to have ideas and be able to turn to others right there and say, ‘What do you think of this?’”

What may be most significant is that the company’s research led to a design that isn’t substantially different from the existing Google buildings, just more so. The older buildings have a mix of private, quiet work spaces (though no private offices) and social and communal work spaces; so will the new one. The older buildings are full of cafés; the new complex will be, too. Radcliffe said that “the cafés were validated” in Google’s studies, as if anyone were surprised. The existing buildings have a relaxed and casual, even whimsical, quality to their interiors, as if to say that pleasure is a part of efficiency; I’m not sure how Google quantifies this except by seeing how many workers like it, but here, too, the plan is to continue on the same track, even if the new buildings aren’t likely to feel quite as improvised. And as the existing buildings have been retrofitted to conserve energy, the new ones will be even greener. And so on.

A lot of this seems like a statement of the obvious, but then again, lots of data is. And architecture, which is so often form-driven, doesn’t necessarily suffer from a bit more attention to factors other than shapes. “We started not with an architectural vision but with a vision of the work experience,” Radcliffe said. “And so we designed this from the inside out.”

Source: vanityfair.com

25 February 2013 10 Permalink

Edward Glaeser’s Laissez-Faire Urbanism

A Bloomberg essay by the urban doyen Edward Glaeser makes a poor case as to why proposed New York City sea walls should be paid for locally, without federal government support:

New York Can Protect Itself Without Federal Aid - Edward Glaeser

Sea walls are expensive. One recent estimate is that they cost $35 million per mile and require maintenance that costs from 5 to 10 percent of that amount per year. At such a price, protecting the entire mid-Atlantic region would be prohibitively expensive, yet defending New York City would be affordable. A great wall running from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to the Far Rockaways would cost less than $500 million based on that estimate.

Nothing in New York comes cheaply, however, and I suspect that the estimate by the Dutch water-risk expert Jeroen Aerts that it would cost $10 billion to build two barriers — one between Sandy Hook and the Rockaways and a second at the north end of the East River — is far closer to the mark. Aerts himself suggests a $17 billion solution with three great walls, and says that an extra $15 billion might be required in added coastline protection.

Aerts’s total of $32 billion would be roughly half the city’s annual budget. But the costs of Hurricane Sandy also ran in the tens of billions. If the alternative is giving up on lower Manhattan, which has hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of property and infrastructure, the price looks downright cheap. If the Netherlands can build a wall system that protects an entire country that lies below sea level, then New York City can protect itself.

Who should pay for these defenses? The protected property owners, of course. There is no reason why New York should look to the federal government in Washington for this spending.

The city has the money to pay the bill, and it should champion the principle that we only build sea walls or other barriers when the people who are protected pay for them. This helps ensure that the benefits justify the costs. We don’t want to go further down a path where every hamlet on the Eastern seaboard feels it has a right to federally financed storm protection.

Sea walls may not be the answer, but any solution is sure to require huge public expenditures. This highlights another central point about cities: They need strong, effective governments.

Exit polls found that Mitt Romney, an advocate of laissez- faire economics, received only 29 percent of the votes in big cities, while President Barack Obama, who believes in big government, won 69 percent of urbanites’ votes. That pattern makes sense, since people in vulnerable cities need government more than people in far-flung rural areas do (even though the latter often get more per capita in federal subsidies).

Economist Matthew Kahn of UCLA has studied the death tolls from natural disasters. He found that where governments are more capable, fewer people die. This makes me worry about the fate of cities in the developing world that are just as subject to natural disasters as New York is but have governments far less capable of taking effective precautionary measures. Kahn has predicted that cities will be able to defend themselves against the changes associated with climate change. While I am far less certain about Karachi, I am optimistic enough to think he is right about New York.

For my confidence to be validated, however, New York needs to spend billions to defend its vulnerable real estate. We have to stop denigrating mega-projects and resurrect the spirit of the city’s master builder, Robert Moses. If it does this right, New York can again provide a model of safety amid threatening storms for the cities of America and the rest of the world.

First of all, let’s start by simply accepting Aerts’s numbers for the sake of argument (although my bet is that they are far too optimistic, by half). The argument Glaeser is making is that those that benefit from something — even when it is a large scale regional infrastructure investment — should be the ones that pay for it.

But, who in fact benefits from the protection of New York City? Is it limited to those owning property there? Does it include those living there, but only renting? What about those that only work in the city, who currently are taxed on their income by the city: they would surely be included? And of course, we already accept the premise that visitors to New York pay taxes for hotels and airport fees, and tools to enter or pass through the city on its bridges and tunnels. So we already have a systems where a great number of people — not just landowners — pay for New York’s infrastructure and operations.

Glaeser seems to generalize from the notion that property owners should pay for their own insurance, and winds up thinking of the city as a collection of individually-owned buildings and property. But a city like New York has an enormous civic side, involving streets, parks, infrastructure, transportation, and municipal and regional operations: it is much more than the sum of its properties. We shouldn’t consider NYC just another ‘hamlet’ on the coast. And I don’t quite understand the Romney v Obama dimension of his argument: is he suggesting that protecting NYC is one of Romney’s ‘gifts’ to the urban voters?

I have argued elsewhere that we need to retreat — in general — from the coast, even in southern Manhattan. But I still believe that the benefits of major urban centers on the coast, especially at the mouth of major rivers, will continue to justify us living and working there.

In the final analysis, the value of New York City is non-linear relative to the population and cash flow streaming in: much more comes out of a productive, creative, and growing metropolis than goes in. And those outputs are not just financial, and they are not held only by the property owners. The region, and by extension the entire United States, is enriched by a working New York City. 

Basically, I reject Glaeser’s core argument because he — of all people! — simply does not factor in the miracle of cities’ non-linear productivity. Or perhaps he assumes that these returns aren’t shared widely.

So, any solution for protecting New York City from future superstorms should be a regional one, in which New York City, New York, New Jersey, and the United States all participate, sharing risks, costs, and eventual benefits when the next superstorm’s damage is averted.

Source: bloomberg.com

27 November 2012 4 Permalink